Mark Meckler is the president of the Convention of States Foundation and a leading proponent of the right-wing movement to get state legislatures to call for a dangerous Article V convention that will consider constitutional amendments to radically alter American government and society by making much of what the federal government now does unconstitutional.
While this effort relies upon fundamental ignorance of the role and purpose of the system of government created by the Constitution, it also appears to be driven in part by the myths promoted by religious-right pseudo-historian David Barton and parroted by various Christian nationalists, several of which Meckler repeated during a recent livestream.
As Right Wing Watch has explained before, the claim that the Founders cited the Bible more than any other book relies on a misrepresentation of 1984 study by professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston that sought to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in “the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805.”
The only reason that the Bible was cited so frequently is because many of the writings included in the research were sermons that had been reprinted in pamphlets for mass distribution. Once those sermon pamphlets were excluded, quotes from the Bible appeared no more frequently in the political writings of the era than citations of the classical or common law.
On top of that, when the study focused solely on the public political writings from 1787 to 1788, when the U.S. Constitution was written and ratified, “the Bible’s prominence disappears” almost completely, Lutz found.